Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Chapter no 78

II

Alice is in the kitchen when she hears the crash.

El’s at the shop getting streamers and she’s working on Catty’s birthday cake, wee Finn sitting on the counter as she measures, mixes, pours, and Alice loves this part—cooking is too wild, too much left to chance, but baking is like maths and chemistry, which are her best subjects this year in school—and she’s just letting Finn add the milk when the sound rings through the house, and Alice has the sense to put her little brother safely on the floor before she rushes toward the sitting

room.

And finds Catty.

Catty, who’s moved on from Derrick to a guy named Malcolm, who’s nineteen and not from Hoxburn, just passing through, because he has the kind of job that takes him places.

Catty, who’s barely passing sixth year, and seems hell-bent on mystifying the counselor assigned to help her find a path because they don’t get that all she wants is to be discovered, to be seen.

Catty, who found one of Mum’s photos in a box instead of on the shelf, and took a bat to the wedding portrait on the mantel. (All that practice in the gravel lot behind the pub.) And that’s bad enough, but there’s glass on the floor and wee Finn toddles in before Alice can get it swept up and cuts his heel. Nothing a couple plasters don’t fix, but feet bleed just as much as heads and hands, and then El returns, and tells Catty to grow up or get out.

The next day, Catty blows out the candles on her seventeenth birthday

cake.

And the next day, she is gone.

She doesn’t leave a note, doesn’t turn on her phone, and she’s too old to be considered a runaway, so there’s nothing to do but wait and hope.

El blames herself (even though Dad says that Catty’s been gathering sticks for years, armfuls of kindling, waiting for an excuse to strike the match), and Dad’s face is lined with worry, and Finn is too young to understand, so he goes around peering behind doors and under tables as if Catty’s just playing some drawn-out game of hide-and-seek, and for the first time in her life Alice fails a test because she can’t sleep, lies awake every night listening for the sound of her sister sneaking back in.

For a week, the walls of the house feel too thick, the air too tight, like

the world is holding its breath.

And then, Catty calls.

“Hey, Bones,” she says like it’s any other day.

Alice is home alone, and she wants to scream, to sob, to throw her arms around her sister but she can’t because she isn’t there, so she just

says, “Where the hell are you, Catty?”

And her sister laughs.

She laughs like nothing’s wrong.

“Right now? York.”

It knocks the wind out of Alice. So far away, so soon. Catty told her once that there was a rope running between them—“Heart to heart,” she said, poking Alice right between the ribs—and every time one moved, the other would know, so Alice tried, told Catty to run and hide, and said she would use the rope to find her.

But it didn’t work.

Alice couldn’t feel it, couldn’t find her, and finally Catty showed up on her own, and shrugged, like the world hadn’t just caved in, and said, “I guess it’s easier for big sisters.”

“York?” Alice asks again, pulling up a map. The number of miles, the route the train would take, the path like a red cord stretching south.

“Yep. And guess what? It’s just as haunted as Mum said it was. All those little alleys full of ghosts and—”

“Please come home,” says Alice, but she can practically hear Catty shaking her head.

“Why would I do that?” she asks, a tight laugh catching in her voice.

Because I’m here, Alice wants to say. Because you promised me we’d go together.

“Look, one day you’ll understand,” says Catty. “The world is big and full of chances. Hoxburn isn’t.”

Alice’s eyes begin to burn. Tears spill down her cheeks. “You should

have waited for me.”

(“Slow down.”)

(“Catch up.”) “I couldn’t.”

Catty doesn’t say she’s sorry (never has), but Alice can hear the pang of sadness in her voice before it picks back up. “But you finish school, get those good grades, and go to one of those big fancy universities, and I’ll be there. By then, I’ll be all set, have enough saved up. And it will

just be the two of us.”

“What about Malcolm?” mutters Alice.

“Oh, he’s gone. He was just a ride. A way out.”

Alice’s stomach twists, relief giving way to worry. “You’re alone?”

Only she’s not, because now Alice can hear another voice somewhere behind her, and then Catty’s saying, “Hey, I gotta go. Hang in there,

Alice.”

“Catty, wait,” she says.

“Catty, please,” she says.

“Catty, just tell me—” she says.

But it’s too late. Her sister’s gone.

“Daft girl,” says Dad when he finds out, and he sounds furious, but that night he tries to call the number back a hundred times.

Of course, by then, the phone is off.

Alice lies there, pressing the pendant against her chest until she can feel her pulse beating through the metal, pretends it’s the other end of their shared rope, that it won’t break, no matter how far Catty goes.

Heart to heart, she whispers into the dark, as her pulse slows—

And slows— And—

Alice wakes at dusk.

Not slowly but all at once, lurching back, one hand still clutching the necklace through her shirt. For a moment, she doesn’t know where she is, or rather, she thinks she knows, back in her single bed in her shared room in

her dorm suite, and she must have climbed beneath the blankets, taken a nap after class, and that’s what she’s always done when she’s sick.

But then she swallows, and tastes the dregs of copper in her throat. She isn’t sick, because sick is a problem that can be fixed, and when she rolls over she sees she’s not in her bed, but on a sofa, a blanket she doesn’t need

draped over her shoulders.

And she remembers.

I really thought you would be safe.

Alice sits up, and sees blood staining the cushion under her cheek, feels a second’s lurching panic before she feels the crust of tears beneath her eyes.

Her gaze drifts to the marble coffee table with its deep crack, a glaring reminder of a rage she tries to summon now, and can’t.

She checks her phone and sees a series of increasingly worried texts in the suite thread—asking where she is, if she’s okay, please, just let them know, say something, don’t make them call campus police. Alice doesn’t know how to answer that so she lies and says Sorry, says Yes, says she’s Staying at a friend’s, even though they all know she doesn’t have anything close to friends outside the suite, barely knows anyone from class.

Alice pockets the phone and looks around.

No sign of Ezra, or Lottie.

The room is empty, the curtains drawn, twilight spilling through a narrow gap, and maybe it’s Lottie’s story, or maybe it’s the dream she had, the memory, but she finds herself hooking the gold chain with her fingers and drawing the pendant from beneath her hoodie.

The pendant, which isn’t a pendant but a locket, a vial.

Her little piece of home.

A bit of glaur, Catty called it—dirt, but not just any dirt.

Her mother’s, taken from the grave, a gift from Eloise on that blue-tinted wedding day.

She unscrews the hidden lid and tips the smallest bit into her palm, and the moment it touches her bare skin she is back in the cemetery plot, and all the strength is rushing out of her, the life leeching backward, her limbs shriveling and her heart drying up and— Alice recoils, wrenching her hand back so fast the flecks of grave dirt rain down onto the splintered marble.

“No, no, no,” she whispers, dropping to her knees beside the table, trying

to salvage the dirt, even though it’s little more than a capful, a coin, and every time it touches her skin that sickness surges up to meet it.

At last she gives up, and screws the tiny gold cap back onto the vial, and what’s left of the dirt inside, shoving the pendant back beneath her shirt.

She leans forward, fills her lungs, and blows, scattering the thin dusting on the marble, is about to retreat beneath the blanket, try to disappear again when she sees a bag that must be Lottie’s, tucked between the table’s feet.

Only, it’s not the bag that holds her gaze.

It’s the book that’s sticking out.

A battered paperback, but she’s read it twice, and she would know the cover anywhere. The marble face turned half-away on the black ground, the serifed type declaring it The Secret History.

Penny’s book.

Alice plucks it from the bag and opens it, flipping to the blank back pages where Lottie kept her litany of conquests, her list of names, no better than the tokens Sabine wore around her neck. Alice doesn’t read them all, except to note how many there are, the names filling not one page, but two, before her eyes go straight to the most recent line. Brief as a tombstone in damning purple ink.

Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief.

She reads it twice, three times, till the lines become words and the words become letters and the letters break apart and still she can’t understand how her entire life has been reduced to six words in this small and sloping script.

And ah—there it is, the anger Alice couldn’t find when she woke up.

There it is, striking up again, as quick as flint.

The page crumples beneath her hands, and she’s about to tear it, when the lock on the hotel door chirps and the door glides open, and Lottie comes in, dressed in fresh clothes and holding a store bag—the fancy kind with tissue sticking out the top—hooked on her elbow, as if she’s been shopping.

Lottie sees Alice, book clenched in her hands, and Alice wants her to lunge forward, to say No, to say Don’t. To try to pry her precious list away, so Alice can take something from her, too.

But Lottie just stands there, watching, waiting, and suddenly the words are just words, a stupid postscript in the back of a battered book, and Alice flings the paperback aside and climbs back onto the couch, drawing up her

knees as Lottie steps over the book, and sets the bag aside, and says, “I’m glad you’re awake.”

Alice glares, and she adds, “Sorry for drugging you. It was Ezra’s idea.

He has more experience with things like this.”

“Things like this,” echoes Alice darkly.

“In the beginning, we’re . . .” she searches for the word, “volatile. Every feeling, every need, is dialed up, the good and the bad. He thought you might hurt yourself. Or at the very least, destroy the room.”

This last said with a shred of lightness, too like a joke.

Alice clenches her teeth as Lottie lowers herself into a nearby chair, sinks her fingers into her curls, and sighs, the air around her tinged with tension.

Alice asks the question that’s bothering her most.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

Of course, until the early hours of last night, Alice was convinced she had —that this strange girl had walked into her life and stolen it from under her.

Now she knows that Lottie’s not to blame for that part—at least, she’s not the one who stopped her heart, even if she’s still the reason why it happened.

“I liked you,” answers Lottie limply. “We had fun and then—”

“Not that night,” says Alice. “After. When you found out what I was.

What she made me.” Alice swallows. “Sabine.” The name, like a bitter cordial on her tongue. “When I showed up here. Changed. Like Penny.”

Lottie’s expression darkens. “I didn’t want to.”

“So you wanted to kill Penny?”

She winces at the name. “No. It broke my heart.”

“But you did it.”

A whispered, “Yes.”

And it occurs to Alice then, that just because Lottie hasn’t killed her yet doesn’t mean she won’t still try, that maybe the only reason she waited was because Ezra might disapprove. Alice looks toward the door, wondering if and when he’ll— “I sent him home,” says Lottie. “This isn’t Ezra’s problem. It’s mine.”

And Alice doesn’t appreciate being called a problem, but her thoughts skip past that to the fact Lottie knew exactly where her mind was going.

“How did you—”

“Your head’s too loud. You might as well be shouting.”

Alice frowns. “How do I think quieter?”

Lottie comes and sits across from her, perching on the edge of the cracked table, close enough that their knees touch, close enough that Alice can see the faintest threads of gold, like filaments of light, in her brown eyes. And even now, despite everything, Alice finds it hard to look away. She feels an echo of the longing that circled her that night, the force that drew her forward, and wonders what could have been, if things were different, if she had woken the next morning and hadn’t been alone in bed.

Lottie’s heart-shaped face burrowing into her shoulder, her violet curls tickling her chin, her cool arms wrapped around her waist, her lips against her ear as she whispered about breakfast.

But then Alice thinks of the list in the back of the book, and knows that’s all she was to Charlotte Hastings, all she would ever be. Alice. Scottish.

Gentle. Tastes like grief.

Lottie’s hand settles on her knee, forcing her attention back, and the look on her face says she knows. There’s pity in her eyes, and Alice doesn’t want

it.

“Show me how it works,” she says.

“It takes practice, to put up walls. To keep your thoughts safely to yourself. But in the meantime, you can try and cover it by thinking pointedly. Focus on one thing you want me to hear, instead of all the things you don’t. It’s not words, really, so don’t try thinking of a number or anything like that. It’s feelings. Emotions, desires, that kind of thing.”

Alice looks Lottie in the eye, and focuses, as loudly as she can, on her distrust.

Lottie nods. “That’s fair,” she says. “I haven’t earned it yet.”

Alice can’t believe it worked, almost smiles before she remembers that it’s Lottie’s fault, and that thought must have come through loud and clear, or at least the blaming part, because she looks exhausted, drawn. And yet, the walls around her mind have gone back up, and no matter how hard Alice strains, she can’t glean the faintest hint of Lottie’s thoughts.

“You want to know why I didn’t kill you?” she says, looking down at her hands. “I wish I could tell you it was kindness, or that I knew you’d been through enough. But it’s not. It’s because I’m tired, Alice.” Her gaze flicks up. “I’m tired of running. Tired of living in fear. Tired of playing cat and mouse, of knowing it’s only a matter of time before Sabine catches up again. I didn’t kill you because someone has to stop her, and I can’t. But maybe you can.”

Alice almost scoffs.

She wants Sabine to pay for what she did, wants to hold her down and drive a stake right through her heart, watch the life go out of her eyes and her body turn to dust.

She wants Sabine to look at her before she dies, to understand that it’s her

fault.

That she created her own killer.

She wants it, of course she does, but Alice is no fool. She may be new to all this, but she suspects that there’s a power differential, that someone— something—as old as Sabine is much, much stronger than she is, and she’s about to point this out, that what Lottie is proposing might as well be suicide, when she says, “You’d get your life back.”

Alice’s mind shudders to a stop so fast she can almost hear the gears.

“What?”

Lottie chews her lip, and nods. “Sabine made you. She took your life. But you can take it back.”

“What are you talking about?” asks Alice.

“I didn’t know that, back when I found Penny. I wish I had. And it wouldn’t work if it had been a year, a month, even a week, but you’re newly made,” says Lottie, eyes alight. “Which means you’re still connected to her.

Your blood. Your life. It’s like a rope that runs between you.”

Alice’s hand drifts to her collar, the pendant cold against her skin.

“If you kill Sabine, you’ll sever it. And you’ll go back to being what you were before.”

Alice cocks her head, uncertain. “What I was?”

“Alive,” says Lottie.

The word flares like a torch in Alice’s chest. Alive. Alive. Alive?

Doubt rushes up to meet it, because that isn’t how it works in all the stories, the good books and bad TV, there’s never any going back, but then again, this isn’t any story, this is hers. Alice versus common lore, and if Lottie’s right, if there’s a way to fix this, if there’s even a sliver of a chance

that it could work— What does she have left to lose?

She looks down at the paperback and thinks of that single line, those six, sad words—Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief.—and decides, right then and there, that they won’t be the last record of her life. The sum total of her story.

Alice looks up at Lottie, searches her face, but all she sees is hope, and it’s like a mirror, catching the sun, reflecting the light. Alice feels herself begin to warm.

“All right,” she says, “what do I have to do?”

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